Talk:George Washington Parke Custis
"After Custis died, his daughter . . . inherited his estate." I could be mistaken but I always thought his grandson got it. Some arcane sexism in probate law. Turtle Fan (talk) 10:38, February 14, 2016 (UTC) Deletion Looking back over this one, it's just another case of "I don't want to make the same kind of mistakes this guy made." A hist ref.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 10:22, October 9, 2016 (UTC) :By the way, I've heard that Lee challenged Custis's will to avoid emancipating the slaves. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:23, October 10, 2016 (UTC) ::I recall a similar thing. Makes it harder to square the real man with HT's depiction in GotS (or LatA, I suppose). TR (talk) 04:04, October 10, 2016 (UTC) :::I think LatA squared well with Lee. I've talked about this with others, and I do believe that, if you knew nothing about Lee, and you read a very thorough biography about him that went in strictly chronological order, when you got up to his meeting with Blair you'd be shocked that he didn't accept. Decade after decade of believing that duty was the sublimest word in the English language, he'd seem to be the perfect unionist. :::But an abolitionist, no. Sure, being presented with incontrovertible proof that history's verdict went against you must come as quite a shock, enough to make any reflective person rethink all sorts of things; but there's nothing in the historical Lee's personality that lets me believe this was natural to him. :::In fact, there's not a single Confederate I can see believably rejecting slavery. Gray-clad abolitionists pop up here and there in historical fiction; I consider this a dangerous revisionism. Turtle Fan (talk) 06:09, October 10, 2016 (UTC) ::::There was Patrick Cleburne, but he was an extremely rare bird. A lot of historians try to have it both ways with Lee and Jackson by explaining that their acceptance of slavery was akin to "only following orders," and that they understood that changing industrial factors would one day make slavery obsolete; they would have considered it fine and dandy for slavery to die a natural death as God willed. The unreality of the popular revisionist fiction is probably why HT - who acknowledged in the "Must and Shall" intro that any change to the ACW will only result in a 10% chance of the CSA winning - needed a scifi gimmick to make the "ultimate reversal" work.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 06:35, October 10, 2016 (UTC) :::::Well, I'll walk back what I said a bit about GotS, since HT was also engaging in various broader philosophical issues of legacy and how we want to be perceived after we are gone. Here Lee knows full well what history thinks of slavery, and has cause to reconsider his position on it. The fact that his supposed benefactors lied to him probably didn't hurt. (Longstreet in 191 was less an abolitionist and more a pragmatist.) TR (talk) 16:16, October 10, 2016 (UTC) ::::::Yes, and I'd argued that Cleburne was as well, in OTL. Turtle Fan (talk) 22:50, October 10, 2016 (UTC) :::::::If the anecdote about Lee challenging the will in order to keep slaves is provably true, then it might merit an inconsistency.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 05:31, October 14, 2016 (UTC) ::::::Not really, no, for the reasons discussed above. TR (talk) 15:10, October 14, 2016 (UTC)